30 June 2012

As Techdirt reported
in 2010, the passage of the Digital Economy Act was one of the most
disgraceful travesties of the UK parliamentary process in recent times;
it was badly drafted, hardly revised and then pushed through with almost
no debate in the dying moments of the previous government. Since then,
two UK ISPs -- BT and TalkTalk -- have challenged the Act in the
courts, but lost earlier this year.

We take antibiotics and their ability to kill practically all
bacteria for granted. But scientists are increasingly warning that we
may be about to leave what might come to be seen as a golden age for
anti-bacterial drugs, and enter a post-antibiotic era. As the World
Health Organization’s Director-General said, quoted in an article on the Citizen Vox site:

Techdirt has always been sceptical about Nathan Myhrvold's business
plan for Intellectual Ventures (IV) -- build up a huge portfolio of
patents, simply so that it can then license them to those that will, and
sue those that won't. Others, however, have been dazzled by Myhrvold's
pedigree as an extremely wealthy ex-Microsoft manager, and by the fact
that patents have undeniably become a central concern for the tech
industries in recent years, which suggests that there is plenty of money
to be made from them.

As I wrote yesterday, one of the most pressing problems the open
source community faces in the near future is the Unitary Patent
proposal, which is likely to bring in software patents to Europe.
Here's the background, and what we can do about it.

Marielle Gallo is probably best known for the Gallo Report, which Techdirt described
back in 2010 as a "similarly draconian intellectual property
enforcement" to ACTA, with which it has much in common. So it's no
surprise that Gallo has been one of the few vocal supporters of ACTA,
and it was widely expected that the EU's Legal Affairs (JURI) committee
she chairs would support her draft opinion calling for ACTA to be
ratified. As we now know, that didn't happen, and JURI formed one of five committees that all recommended that ACTA should be rejected.

One of the the reasons why legislation like SOPA and treaties like
ACTA are so dangerous is that their loose definitions allow measures
intended to deal with copyright infringement to be used to censor
inconvenient opinions. Unfortunately, that's not just a theoretical
problem with future legislation, but one that is already happening, as this post from Rick Falkvinge makes clear:

Something seems to be going on in the European Union. Over the next
few weeks a range of really important debates and votes are taking
place, all connected with openness in some way. Quite why everything is
happening at once is not entirely clear - unless politicians are trying
to get everything out of the way before their summer hols, perhaps....

There's a fairly constant pattern in the world of copyright
enforcement. The media companies claim that piracy is "destroying"
their industries, although they never offer any independent evidence to
back this up. They "demand" that governments "do something" -- by which
they mean introduce harsher penalties for unauthorized downloads.
Because of the hypnotic effect that musicians and artists seem to have
on politicians, governments happily oblige, even though there is no
evidence that such laws will help artists. After the laws come in to
force, online sharing may dip for a while, but soon returns to previous
levels, so the media companies start whining again, and demand yet
tougher penalties.

Once more, there's good news on the ACTA front. Today, the important European Parliament committee responsible for handling international trade issues, INTA, voted to recommend that the European Parliament reject ACTA when it comes to a plenary vote on 4 July.

Another major milestone has been achieved in the push to get ACTA
rejected by the EU: a fifth parliamentary committee has recommended that
the European Parliament should refuse to ratify it when it is put to
the vote on July 4th, effectively killing it in Europe. The other committees
– on legal affairs, civil liberties, industry and international
development – recommended rejection a few weeks ago, but today's vote by
the international trade committee (INTA) was seen as the most
important.

The computing revolution is not the only one driven by constant
scaling of technologies: the field of genomics -- the study of DNA
sequences -- has also enjoyed rapid falls in basic costs over the last
decade and a half. This means that whereas the first human genome cost
around $3 billion to sequence, we are fast approaching the point where
it will cost first a few thousand, and then a few hundred dollars to
sequence anyone's complete DNA. An interesting post on the Health
Affairs Blog points out that neither the law nor society is ready for this.

On the not-very-scientific basis of several calls to MEPs yesterday, the impression I get is that the right-of-centre ECR group on the INTA committee will be pushing for delay until after the ECR has delivered its judgement. That could be in more than a year's time, and would be a big problem in terms of getting ACTA rejected, since all of the momentum that has built up over the last six months would be lost.

Until recently there has been an unchallenged assumption that the
more copyright, the better. Although people have begun to realize
that's not the case – and that extending copyright diminishes the public
domain because we must all wait longer for works to enter it --
governments around the world continue to make copyright longer, stronger
and broader.

A few months ago we wrote
about a really bad idea that was being floated in Germany: making
companies like Google pay for the use of news snippets in services such
as Google News. Unfortunately, that idea has now been turned into a
concrete proposal for a new law; remarkably, it is even worse than the
original plans.

When the history of modern Brazil comes to be written, a special
place will be reserved for the soybean, the powerful farmers that grow
it -- and the deforestation
it is driving. And at the center of that tale will be Monsanto, with
its patented "Roundup Ready" crop, so called because it has been
genetically modified to withstand the herbicide glyphosate, marketed as
Roundup.

So, we arrive at the penultimate stage of the battle to stop ACTA in
Europe. Before the final plenary vote in the European Parliament in
July, there is a vote in the International Trade committee (INTA) this Thursday. As its home page explains:

Performing rights societies probably don't have the best reputations
here on Techdirt, but just when you think they can't get any more
outrageous in their demands, they do. Here are two stories from the Slovak Republic, both involving SOZA, the Slovak Performing and Mechanical Rights Society:

Net Neutrality has suddenly become a hot topic again. Partly, that's
thanks to some awful ideas about regulating the Internet coming from
the International Telecommunication Union, notably those proposed by the
ETNO -- the European Telecommunications Network Operators Association
-- discussed recently on Techdirt. New information from WCITLeaksWikileaks (found via the Net neutrality in Europe site) provides us with the following details (pdf):

As expected, the UK government has published its Draft Communications Bill
(pdf) -- better known as the "snooper's charter," since it requires
ISPs to record key information about every email sent and Web site
visited by UK citizens, and mobile phone companies to log all their
calls (landline information is already recorded).

In recent months, Techdirt has reported on an important development in the world of medicine, as both India and Brazil
have allowed local companies to produce cheap generic versions of drugs
covered by patents. In an even bigger blow to Western pharmaceutical
companies, it looks like China is following suit:

Since my last ACTA update, quite a lot of good stuff has happened. For a start, all four European Parliament committees have recommended that ACTA should be rejected
when the plenary vote takes place at the beginning of July. That just
leaves one more committee - that for International Trade, or INTA - to make its recommendation, which should take place next week. I'll be writing more about this vote soon.

10 June 2012

Recently, an interesting report entitled "The legacy of the BBC Micro" appeared (freely available online).
For those of you too young to remember this trail-blazing UK computing
project from the dawn of microcomputers, here's some background from the
report:

Recently, Techdirt wrote
about the increasing number of Web sites that were dumping Google Maps
and turning to OpenStreetMap (OSM) instead. But that's only one aspect
of the increasingly important digital mapping sector: another is for use
with in-car satnav systems. So an obvious question is: how is
OpenStreetMap doing here?

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote
about how the ever-increasing storage capacity of portable hard drives
made it unlikely that the sharing of music could ever be stopped. That
was a somewhat theoretical piece based on general trends in technology;
but here's some supporting data from a rather unusual source: North
Korea (aka the "Democratic People's Republic of Korea" - DPRK).

Too often we read that the Internet is making us stupid or fat, or destroying
the "fabric of society." Indeed, judging by the all the digital
jeremiads it's a wonder that anybody dares to use it at all, since it's
clearly irredeemably bad in every way. So it's refreshing to come
across an upbeat piece from Lauren Weinstein with the inspiring title "How the Internet Can Save the World." His basic point is this:

Techflaws
alerts us to an announcement by ZPÜ, the organization responsible for
setting the levy on storage media in Germany, that fees will rise rather
significantly (German original).
For a USB stick with a capacity greater than 4 Gbytes, the tax would
increase from 8 eurocents (about 10 cents) to 1.56 euros (about $1.93), a
rise of 1850%; for a memory card bigger than 4 Gbytes, the fee would go
up from 8 eurocents to 1.95 euros (about $2.42), an increase of 2338%.

Since today is a Bank Holidayin the UK, I hope that a few of you might take the opportunity to make a submission to the UK consultation on open standards. This closes at 11.59pm this evening (BST), so you still have time to answer the online questionnaires for chapter 1, chapter 2 and chapter 3. Alternatively (or additionally), you can also submit something directly to openstandards@digital.cabinet-office.gov.uk.

Although the traditional image of a science laboratory typically
consists of a room full of test tubes or microscopes, the reality is
that computers now play a central role there, just as they do for
business and life in general.

Eben Moglen has been battling to defend key digital rights
for the last two decades. A lawyer by training, he helped Phil
Zimmerman fight off the US government's attack on the use of the Pretty
Good Privacy encryption program in the early 1990s, in what became
known as the Crypto Wars. That brought him to the attention of Richard
Stallman, founder of the GNU project, and together they produced version
3 of the GNU GPL, finally released after 12 years' work in 2006.

In a country where the mainstream media is tightly controlled,
Chinese microblogs have provided an invaluable way for millions of
people to find and share unofficial information. That's obviously
problematic for the Chinese authorities, who have been gradually
clamping down on what they term "rumors".

Most people have concentrated on the ITRE, JURI and LIBE committees
(as I did in my previous posts this week). But there's a fourth
committee that is meeting to decide upon its recommendation to INTA: that of Development. Here's how it describes itself on its home page:

One of the most dishonest aspects of ACTA was its attempt to equate
genuinely dangerous products like fake medicines with totally harmless
ones like unauthorized digital copies. Fortunately, that's such an
absurd equivalence that more and more people have voiced their concerns
over it -- including the Liberals and Democrats in the European
Parliament, who cited it as one reason why they would be voting against ACTA:

Yesterday I posted my submission to the ITRE committee; today I include my email to the JURI (legal affairs) and LIBE (civial
liberties) committees, both of which are voting on what their
recommendations should be on May 31. I have lumped them together since
both are largely concerned with legal issues. Here's how JURI describes itself:

This is the first of my posts about the various committees that will
be offering their recommendations to the European Parliament through the
main INTA (international trade) committee. It concerns ITRE, the Committee on Industry, Research and Energy, which will be holding its crucial vote on May 31 - so, no time to lose.

At the end of last year we wrote
about the case of Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg, former Federal Minister
of Defense in Germany, who lost both his post and his doctorate when it
turned out that he had plagiarized portions of his doctoral thesis. Now
the journal Science is reporting another possible case:

I have been writing about ACTA here for what seems several centuries. The good news is that I will stop doing that soon, because the key vote on ACTA will be taking place in the European Parliament at the beginning of July. Contrary to some reports, ACTA is
not dead: although there have been some important shifts in the last
few months - actually, pretty staggering ones when you consider the
situation at the end of last year - votes in the European Parliament are
notoriously hard to predict. This means we must assume that the battle
is still on, and not become complacent.

Most people will be familiar with Moore's Law,
usually stated in the form that processing power doubles every two
years (or 18 months in some versions.) But just as important are the
equivalent compound gains for storage and connectivity speeds, sometimes
known as Kryder's Law and Nielsen's Law respectively.

One of the more controversial approaches to the already controversial
field of climate change is geoengineering, which Wikipedia defines
as "deliberate large-scale engineering and manipulation of the
planetary environment to combat or counteract anthropogenic changes in
atmospheric chemistry."

As I've noted before, open data is one area where the UK government
shines - unlike open source, where it has yet to deliver the goods. One
of its bright ideas was the creation of an Open Data Institute (ODI),
which I wrote about at the end of last year. It still doesn't exist yet, but it does have a Web site with some interesting further information about its intentions.

So, once again, the Business Software Alliance (BSA) has come out
with its annual report on software piracy around the world, entitled
"Shadow Market" [.pdf]. And, once again, it makes all the same methodological mistakes - it's almost as if the BSA hasn't been reading my critiques of last year and the year before....

Recently Techdirt wrote
about the heated debate on the subject of whether people should learn
to code. We pointed out that some knowledge of that subject could be
particularly useful in helping people understand why copyrighting APIs
or patenting software is just crazy -- whatever the abstract legal
arguments, in practice both make programming much, much harder.

About Me

I have been a technology journalist and consultant for 30 years, covering
the Internet since March 1994, and the free software world since 1995.

One early feature I wrote was for Wired in 1997:
The Greatest OS that (N)ever Was.
My most recent books are Rebel Code: Linux and the Open Source Revolution, and Digital Code of Life: How Bioinformatics is Revolutionizing Science, Medicine and Business.